Face it – Companies must navigate a perfect storm of ballooning customer inquiries, talent shortages, hybrid operations, and a rising tide of customer expectations.
To succeed, customer service organizations must curate a set of technologies that underpin their operations. To discover the most important ones, we surveyed technology decision-makers, suppliers, and other subject matter experts for their opinions about which ones really mattered. We narrowed our search to technologies that are 1) the most critical to customer operations; 2) commercially available at enterprise scale and 3) solve key challenges for self-service and digital engagement, inquiry routing, agent operations, collaboration, and workforce management.
We published our findings in our “contact centers for customer service tech tide”.
Key findings from Forrester’s Tech Tide
Here are some highlights from our report:
- Technology stalwarts now work better together. CCaaS, workforce management, and ticketing form the backbone of customer operations. Even though they’ve been around for decades, vendors continue to make them relevant today. Vendors also realize that these technologies must work together to deliver the most value. They offer guidance and reference architectures to do just that.
- GenAI increases the value of a broad swath of technologies. Knowledge management, agent augmentation, and automated quality monitoring (AQM) have been in the market for years. Yet they haven’t generated their expected value because they’re just too hard to use. GenAI’s personalization and summarization capabilities have breathed new life into them, making their ROI potential finally achievable.
- It’s a fine balance between risk and reward for newer technologies. There are many exciting ones out there today. Examples include agent augmentation technologies, which offload repetitive work from agents; conversational AI, which simulates human conversation; and digital adoption platforms (DAPs), which guide agents through onboarding flows and complex processes. They often show great potential in pilots but don’t always deliver results when scaled because organizations don’t pay enough attention to their adoption, change management and governance.
- Some long-established technologies finally are put to rest. AI, coupled with the focus on fluid, ongoing, and personal customer engagement has killed off some categories. For example, there are no standalone options for touch-tone and directed dialogue IVRs as they are now part of more comprehensive CCaaS solutions. Nowadays, sophisticated conversational experiences driven by large language models (LLMs) replace these basic solutions. This puts an end to one of the longest-standing technologies in the customer service space.
We feature 20 of the top technologies for customer service in our report. We highlight their maturity and business value. We give guidance on whether you should experiment, invest in, maintain or divest from these technologies. Let us know what you think, and connect with me or one of my colleagues via inquiry to discuss further.
